John James Weitbrecht

John James Weitbrecht (1802-1852) was originally from Germany. He and his wife, Mary Edwards Weitbrecht (widow of LMS missionary Thomas Higgs) served as CMS missionaries in Burdwan, India, 1834-1852. The Weitbrecht’s sailed for England on furlough in December 1841, returning to India in October 1844. Weitbrecht gained some recognition for his publication, Protestant Missions in Bengal Illustrated (1844). Mrs. Weitbrecht continued in India long after her husband’s death, publishing some important works on the role of women in Indian missions and on the condition of women in India, especially those who were under the restrictive isolation of the zenana. She writes in The Women of India and Christian Work in the Zenana (1875) that “everywhere [zenana] means the same thing, namely, that women are not to be trusted, but must be shut up as birds in a cage – must be hidden from the sight of all but their own husbands … Yet it is only lately that we have begun to realise, even in the faintest degree, the thickness of the gloom in which these poor women have been for so many long centuries simmered.” She died in Notting Hill, London, in 1888, aged 79. Among Mrs. Weitbrecht’s publications are Female Missionaries in India: Letters from a Missionary’s Wife Abroad to a Friend in England (1843); Missionary Sketches in North India with References to Recent Events (1858); and a Memoir of her husband (1857). See Frederic Boase, Modern English Biography, 6 vols. (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965) 6:819; Anna Johnston, Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) (quotation from Mrs. Weitbrecht above taken from p. 88).